Under a Pale Moon

I got rid of Mozilla Firefox yesterday and replaced it with Pale Moon. Verdict: I probably would have done this for technological reasons, not ideological reasons, if I had known about Pale Moon before. Basically, it feels about 10-15 percent faster than Firefox, which has become increasingly crufty over the last few years and was offering new beta updates literally every week.

The installation process was two-part, the first being the usual download and install, the second being the download of the bookmarks importation tool that also migrated my various preferences and passwords. A little clunky, but no bother, and everything works, including NoScript. After about 2 hours, I was confident enough in Pale Moon to go ahead and remove Firefox from the system. If you are considering #uninstallfirefox, Pale Moon is definitely a preferred alternative if you are on Windows.

Plus I am amused by the fact that there are no plans for a Mac version. The developers are open to Linux, but Macintosh. No. Just no. Also, Linux users should note that Pale Moon runs under WINE; due to its superior speed and efficiency emulated Pale Moon may well run better than native Firefox.

For Android, I’m using Opera Mini for now, but I’m not particularly fond of it, so further investigation is required. I’m also going to start looking for a Thunderbird replacement.

NB: The all-time percentage of Firefox is 34 percent here and 30 percent at Alpha Game. It’s already down to 28 percent here and 26 percent there.